Gadgetory

okay wait what was this already recording how's it going guys welcome back let me show you this monitor this monitor I've had for a while this is the asus rog swift key g3 for 8q when it first launched in 2016 it was just about the best gaming monitor that you could buy on the market with it's 34 40 by 1440 21 by 9 ultra wide resolution a hundred Hertz and gsync it was no wonder this thing was priced at around 1,300 bucks when it first launched I've been using this monitor for a couple years now it's amazing - game on but why am I talking about this panel that's nearly 2 years old now well just yesterday a brand spankin new 2019 gaming monitor arrived on my doorstep and this thing looks so good on paper and it's been getting so many positive reviews that it actually threatens to replace this panel as my primary gaming display so that's what we're doing today we're gonna see if the PG 3 4 8 Q retains its throne or if it stays on my main gaming desk are finally over now where did I put that monitor it's not here ok I think it's in the garage let's go to the garage here LG this is the LG ultra gear 3 for gk 9 5 0 f 34 inches free sync - this is great because we now get support for AMD and geforce cards that are Maxwell architecture or later so that definitely makes this panel a bit more attractive whether you're going team red or team green on the graphics side of things 144 Hertz this is what I'm most excited about and what could very well tip the scales in LG's favor for me because our rog swift monitor maxes out at a hundred hertz and since hotline 2 is gonna be my primary gaming desktop and it's just an absolute beast with a 99 hundred k and dual twenty ATT is in sli you're gonna easily blow past the 100 frames per second mark in the majority of titles at 34 40 by 14 40s it's like a walk in the park so 144 Hertz is definitely appealing and standing out to me as a notable feature over my current display nano IPS this refers to LG's own nano cell technology it's their own take on IPS have reviewed a couple TVs using the same technology very sharp wide viewing angles and that sort of thing we've got HDR and a bunch of other bells and whistles on this thing that we'll explore in a moment so let's get this guy in the house and we'll take her out of the box alright open this guy up I should mention that this is currently selling on Amazon for eleven hundred and fifty bucks us there's also a g-sync version of this exact panel and it looks to be about fifty bucks cheaper on Amazon but it's a little bit more expensive on Newegg that being said it's using an older jisuk module actually the same one I think that's in the my rog swift panel so it only supports up to 100 Hertz whereas the freesync 2 version that we have here again 144 ok these are accessories Oh what is this stand the base of the stand Oh big foam coming in rest of the stand and the big daddy himself oh yeah don't drop anything else yeah see that's all folks thin bezel actually all the bezels are uniform they're all thin and black whereas our rog swift has a bit of a prominent chin it's a different color it's great doesn't look bad but it certainly looks cleaner here on the LG panel some other tidbits about this panel while I clean up here it is featuring a DCI p3 98% color space which is actually wider than the ROG panel which I believe is 100% srgb stand is super thin and light but also looks to be pretty sturdy I guess will verify that once the panels on poulos completely tool is just snaps on haha all right so you've got height tilt and swivel adjustment the other thing I like about this stand is that it's just sort of this V shape as opposed to the sort of Y footing on the pg3 4 eq which means you kind of have to like I can put this monitor really far back without too much problem but I can't do the same thing on the PG 3 for 8 Q I actually have to bring it up quite a bit so that it's middlefoot that's sticking out straight back doesn't hang over the edge and the whole monitor goes toppling over so just on the stand alone this might be a better option if you're dealing with a more narrow desk that's not as deep and the curvature on this thing is actually much more aggressive than on the rog swift panel you get an 1800 hour curve here compared to 3800 are on the rog swift and it is very noticeable how much more curvaceous this guy is look at the i/o here you've got two USB 3.0 downstream and one USB 3.0 upstream port DisplayPort that's of course if you want to take advantage of free sync - although I believe you could probably also use one of these HDMI ports assuming one of them is HDMI 2.0 to take advantage of that as well headphone jack and DC power just like the PG three for EQ now this isn't for everyone but I really like how the ports are exposed here and there very accessible whereas on the PG three for aq there is a cover plate that just sort of covers all the ports and stuff for a cleaner look I don't think most people care what the back of the screen looks like they'd rather be able to get to ports easily even with that cover plate removed I don't even have it installed because it's just a nuisance the ports on that rog swift monitor are kind of still recessed much more than this and they're actually facing upward so you have to sort of fish around go underneath and up to find the various inputs and outputs so definitely like the design choice a bit more on the ultra gear one thing I could do without on this panel aesthetically are the red accents I would prefer to be color neutral like my rog swift panel but being said most of the red accents if not all of them in fact are sort of facing the back side of the panel so when you're looking at dead on you can hardly see any red I mean the most noticeable area is probably the the base of the stand that's only if you're looking at it from a steep angle or something like that but it's worth noting in case you're going for a very specific look for your setup and people are gonna be able to see the back of your display all right let's fire this thing up alright so I've got the monitor hooked up to hot line I just did a clean install of Windows 10 but we're a bit we're on hold for now because I got to wait for Windows updates to finish we need to wait for this to finish before we can install the GeForce drivers so in the meantime there are a couple things that I forgot to mention about the monitor up until this point for starters base amount if you don't like the stand you want a wall mount if for whatever reason you can remove the stand entirely and there's 100 by 100 millimeter base amount on the back of the display also let's take a quick look at the OSD was a little joystick here you would think the joystick would be right in the middle of the monitor but it's actually offset just ever so slightly to the left and then you've got a couple of simple options here power input power input oh oh it's a little it's a little finicky the joysticks a little sensitive definitely not as intuitive as the the Auris monitor that I reviewed not too long ago so you've got game mode this is just sort of quick on the fly between different profiles you got your FPS RTS the gamer profiles are customizable and you can also tap into settings here a bunch of more options pop up I kind of like this at a glance look at your main settings just so you can see it really quick and you can see we've also got some more settings right here that weren't available to us on the sort of on the flying menu that we just saw and you've got a game adjust section with free sync so you've got basic extended black stabilizer response time which you can change depending on how much emotion is going to be on screen speaking of response time this is a one millisecond panel but that's with the help of motion blur reduction so it's technically probably closer into four or five maybe six milliseconds in reality because it's an IPS display IPS displays are just not known as being quite as fast as TN panel for example even though they have much higher color reproduction but with the help of motion blur reduction you get a seemingly faster and more responsive panel what else is in here there's oh there's crosshairs you can put the crosshair let's see okay so you got an exit the OSD for it to apply by so it's just baked into the monitor doesn't take up any system resources and it's it's basically an overlay so you'll be able to have a little cheating crosshair in pretty much any game or application you need picture adjusts some standard settings here nothing too fancy and lastly if you're not in the OSD at all that you move the joystick left or right you can adjust the headphone volume assuming you have that plugged in or brightness if you want to go up and down on the joystick so but that's it for the OSD it's super straightforward no frills it's obviously not as easy to use or as intuitive as the Auris monitor that I checked out which basically functions as a Windows 10 desktop app that you can interface with keyboard mouse and stuff but it gets the job done it's pretty standard of what you'd find on a gaming display here in 2019 our Windows updates looking 59 it's hardly moved since we started filming this bit it's ridiculous what's taking so long I man hate your windows ok video drivers are installed we can play some games but firsts already went to the OSD and enabled free sync not in the Nvidia control panel gonna switch over to a hundred and forty-four Hertz thank you very much uh-huh yeah that's the stuff yeah let's play again so right off the bat colors be a pop in yo it's looking real mass very vibrant rich color definitely thanks to the nano cell technology from LG as well as the DCI p3 98% color space it's looking really good whoo Oh what was that is that the game it was cutting out and turned in black first flip second I'm assuming that's the game and hopefully not my very expensive gaming PC or the monitor itself ok I just want to stay in the greener parts of the map because it just looks really pretty very responsive superfast monitor holy moly getting some weird artifacts here I don't know if you guys can tell but there's some weird stuff going on right here that part of the screen not sure if that's the the GPU or the game I'll have to look into that later yeah boy oh shit what alright so I backed out of Apex legends because I just want to see if the black screen issue that we were encountering persists and sure enough it does it's still happening so it's not the title I think it's gotta have something to do with GeForce hardware using a free sync display free sync is still enabled in the OSD and gsync is enabled within into the control panel it does say right here that the selected display is not validated as g-sync compatible so maybe there's some issue there it's not really playing nicely for whatever reason but I'm gonna try something else I'm gonna switch us to 120 Hertz here because maybe there's just a certain peak of g-sync slash free sync support here before any sort of issues arise let's jump back in to Apex alright so it's been about 5 minutes and no black screens whatsoever it seems like the problem is completely fixed which leads me to believe that 120 Hertz is the most you can get out of this panel if you happen to be using geforce cards and you want to take advantage of adaptive refresh rate AKA free sync in this case all right I've had enough of you Apex let's jump into a different game how about some car lumps so the black screen is gone now but we have these weird lines still here these were around in apex as well it's really kind of weird not exactly sure what's going on gotta kill these guys first alright so let's try to figure out what's going on there this is sort of turned into a semi troubleshooting video I'm gonna back out and see if we can figure out what's causing those weird lines okay so I have an update I ran ddu reinstall the GeForce drivers the problem still persists so then I switched over to the I GPU I actually plug the display cable into the motherboard itself so we're running from the integrated graphics on the 9900 Kay and still the lines are there so it has nothing to do with the GPUs or the GeForce drivers and then I realized if I have this app in windowed mode and I slide it over the lines disappear it's apparently only visible when the application is overlapping this part of the screen really weird behavior so leads me to believe that we may have a defect monitor it doesn't keep me from continuing on with the video but it is a bit disappointing especially because I was I was getting ready to swap out my rog swift panel for this one it was looking really good up until this moment right now because this is this is not this is just not gonna fly this is unusable I don't really see the lines unless there's a 3d application open but I do see some weird artifacting on the taskbar yeah there's there's definitely something funky going on with with the LG panel here and I guess there's nothing we can do except carry on with the video I guess we'll jump into one more game let's do shadow of the tomb Raider's it's also an HDR game so I'm gonna go ahead and enable HDR on the panel as well and then we have to go into our Windows display settings windows HD color and play HDR games and apps we're gonna enable that and remember when you enable this it really only benefits you when you actually feed the panel HDR supported content you shouldn't just enable this and go browse the web or use your desktop willy-nilly otherwise the colors aren't going to be balanced or it might look a little washed out like it does right now all right I was just rolling around on the game for a few minutes here and I grabbed some screenshots some with HDR on some with it off and I made sure to be in the same position so we get a nice apples to apples comparison so we've got our first side-by-side here no HDR on the left HDR enabled on the right and right off the bat it's much brighter with HDR on that's not necessarily a good thing though some people still might prefer the look of HDR disabled because just because it's brighter doesn't mean the contrast is better the image just looks a little bit blown out it's almost too bright and somewhat blinding especially like if you look at the dead bodies on the ground there they look overexposed in my opinion and I think a lot of people would prefer the look of HDR disabled even though the colors don't necessarily pop it's a bit more natural-looking I don't think the HDR implementation on this panel is really what people think of when they think of really good HDR mainly because it doesn't have local dimming like a lot of true HDR televisions have they're really handicaps the panel's HDR capabilities and keeps it from having a much more dynamic contrast and a wider range of color once again in our second pair of screenshots you can see that it's much brighter on the right with HDR than it is on the left but again when you're looking at the reflections of the Sun in the water in the stream that's below lara croft it's just it's it's pretty blown out so again it's brighter but it kind of falls short of a true you are experienced in my opinion now this last example is probably the best showcase for the HDR implementation in this panel and for the game itself for that matter because we're looking at the Sun now which is supposed to be a really bright object so it plays well with the HDR effect here that just tends to be overly hot in general whereas without HDR it looks very dull and boring so you know I think the HDR experience on this display is going to depend partly on the type of content that you feed it but also without local dimming built into the display at a hardware level you're just not going to get that same dynamic contrast or really wide range of colors that you might see in an HDR demo for example on the show floor of CES because I've seen those demos and they are freaking mind-blowing like true HDR with local dimming is really a sight to behold this is not it this is a bit underwhelming and further validates that gaming panels have a long way to go when it comes to true HDR support alright we're gonna close the video out with some doom because it's a super fast paced shooter which is really gonna take advantage of the higher fresh right here and we can you can see we're soaring past the 144 Hertz mark this monitor just moves so fast and it stays really smooth while doing so I definitely say this is the best gaming monitor that LG's ever made hands down and to be honest the only thing keeping me from swapping out the ROG monitor for this one is the fact that we have those stupid artifact lines that are just kind of ruining the game I did confirm that it is the the panel I plugged in the completely different system and the lines are still there so it's definitely the monitor I looked online to see if anyone had a similar issue with this display I could not find any recurring instances so that's good at least and for the record I should mention that it's completely impractical and unfair of me to compare this display to the PG three for aq simply because that panel came out like two years ago at the same time that Asus display has been my primary gaming monitor for a couple years now so I guess it's a relevant comparison for me anyway the other thing is that they're not too far off in price 904 the rog swift versus eleven hundred and fifty these are approximations at the time of filming but for the money i would say you get more bang for your buck going with the LG display assuming it's not defective get a more aggressive curve if you're into that sort of thing higher refresh rate freesync support so it can actually be used with AMD and gpus a wider color gamut and a smarter stand in my opinion that just is designed a bit more practically as far as downsides ago I would say the HDR experience isn't quite as impressive as you might want it to be and not everyone is gonna be a fan of the black and red color scheme there's also competing displays out there that have more sophisticated OSDs with a lot more features than this one but that being said this is again the best gaming display I've ever seen LG put on the market so props to them for that I'm looking forward to seeing what they do next guys thank you for watching this video I'm actually just gonna continue playing games I don't want to edit just yet so thank you for watching if you enjoyed it toss a like on the video before you go get subscribed and all that Jess you don't miss any more videos coming up really soon and I'll see you guys in the next video goodbye bye